He heard a gunshot. Carrying his son, Paul ran to the doorway and saw a man with a gun standing over Helen, who lay on the living room floor, bleeding.

Poppy screamed.

Paul turned on his heels and made for the back of the house, holding the boy. He tried to hide, but the man followed him into the bathroom. Paul sank to his knees in a corner, head down, shielding his child. The man fired. Gailiunas felt a bullet sear his cheek. Another one burned into his left forearm. Something—another bullet? A ricochet?—slashed his right hand.

Leave, prayed Paul. Leave now. He felt his blood spreading on the floor. He tried to pretend that he was dead. Don’t reload. His body covered the boy, who had gone silent. At least one of us is shot, he thought.

He heard the back door slam.

Paul pushed himself off the floor. In a daze, he led Poppy into the bedroom. He fumbled on the nightstand and found Helen’s glasses, put them on, and punched the numbers 9-1-1 on his cell phone.

Police officers were questioning the man and woman in the guesthouse when Paul Gailiunas’ scream burst out of the squad car’s radio. Helen had a bullet through the neck.

He unlocked the front door as the police arrived. One of the officers ushered Paul and his son onto the front steps. The house had become a crime scene.

As Paul and Poppy sat on the steps, Paul tried to figure out what had happened. Helen must have woken up to let Rosie into the backyard. Police would theorize that the intruder fleeing the bed-and-breakfast hopped over the back fence just as Helen opened the kitchen door. As the man barged into the house, Helen struggled with him, her screams waking Paul.

She saved our lives, he told himself.

An ambulance arrived. They got in.

Helen was buried in the cemetery beside her grandfather, Pop. “Hers was hardly a typical funeral procession,” reported the Columbia State, Helen’s hometown paper. “A parade of her brightly garbed friends (ancient plaid suits, motorcycle boots, striped stockings) walked from the Nickelodeon to St. Paul’s on Bull Street.”

Friends from Helen’s Cal Arts years flew to Columbia for the funeral. So did friends from Cambridge, Halifax, New Orleans, New York, even Korea. Paul, Poppy, and Elijah Aron wore seersucker suits in honor of Helen. Always a southern girl, she had loved seeing men in seersucker.

Back in New Orleans, public anger exploded over a surging homicide rate. On the day of Helen’s death, the city would reel from six murders in 24 hours. “Killings bring the city to its bloodied knees,” cried a Times-Picayune headline. Days earlier, violence also claimed Dinerral Shavers, a 25-year-old snare drummer for the Hot 8 Brass Band, a popular local band. An anti-violence protest on January 11 drew 3,000 people to City Hall, calling for the resignations of Mayor Ray Nagin, District Attorney Eddie Jordan, and Police Superintendent Warren Riley.

No resignations were forthcoming; the deeper problem was endemic poverty feeding a vicious drug culture, running rampant in a city whose defenses had been torn apart by Katrina. The city’s police department had lost its crime lab in the flood and was severely understaffed. As drug thugs fought for shrinking turf, armed robbers roamed the poorest streets with impunity—Marigny had been known as a safe enclave before Katrina.

Months later, there are still few clues to the identity of Helen’s killer. Hopes ride on a $5,000 reward and national attention; 48 Hours and America’s Most Wanted have filmed interviews with Paul and the family that are expected to be aired in September. “I’m in frequent contact with the New Orleans police,” Helen’s brother, Jake, says. “I’m painfully aware of how overwhelmed the system is. They’re 300 officers down, they've just gotten the crime lab back. But I’ve had good, extensive meetings with men on the case.”

Like Paul and the rest of Helen’s family, Jake struggles with his reaction to her murder. “Helen lived up to her principles,” he says. “Paul, Kevin, my mother, and I have to put our principles on the line. I’d be the first to argue against the death penalty—Helen didn’t support it. I just hope the son-of-a-bitch is caught and put in prison forever.”

“Helen coined a term for herself—a ‘romance-activist,’” Paul says. “She believed that the key to a lasting, healthy relationship was not to fall in love at first sight—you should develop a friendship first.”

The words come as Paul sits in a vegetarian restaurant in Vancouver’s west side, a neighborhood of storefront cafes, clothing shops, restaurants, bars, a left-wing bookstore, and a multi-ethnic vibe one finds in Greenwich Village, Cambridge, or the French Quarter.

There is a disarming sweetness about Paul Gailiunas. He speaks with the gentle manner of a physician curious about a patient. To questions about his own life, he answers that he is moving slowly. “I still have nightmares, waking up and thinking about safety, checking doors. I still have some muscle problems,” he says, extending his right hand, which shows a sunken space in the web between thumb and forefinger, tissue damage from the bullet. “But my therapy is coming along pretty well.” (Both father and son are seeing therapists.)

He apologizes as his cell phone rings—a physician returning his call about part-time work. He leaves the table. On returning, he says: “The only reason to go back to New Orleans would be to try and make it better, and I don’t have that in me.” He pauses. “I have to take care of my son. I think the furthest-case scenario would be a guy from New Orleans hiring someone to track us down, but I’m not ready to move out of here.”

Paul and Francis Pop are living with his mother in a part of Vancouver he calls “safe—I’d rather not say much more. It’s a nice neighborhood, and my son is doing as well as can be expected. He is such a sweet, good little boy.”

At night he shows Poppy, who is three years old, photographs of Helen. “I tell him his mother is with the angels.” His eyelids flutter. He nods, gazing at the street in thought.

“Helen and I lived in a little bit of a dream world,” he says.

He remembers her in countless ways, but one of the most tangible and insistent is her work, which told so much of her own story. Probably her finest film is called Mouseholes. Helen made it in 1999 as a tribute to her grandfather, years after his death. She had been finishing graduate work at Cal Arts when Pop, then 91, was hospitalized with kidney failure. Helen made several trips home, taping bedside conversations with Pop on a cassette player. The screen shows cutout figures of the white-haired old man in a bed. Deliberately sounding like a girl of 12, Helen narrates: “My grandfather got smaller each day.” Cut to a home-movie scene of the young siblings, with Jake’s voice as narrator: “Pop had a car collec- tion, and he built model airplanes.”

Helen’s voice continues: “Where are we going?”

The viewer hears Pop answer. “Just roaming around,” he says.

“Hey, Pop, tell me. Where are you?”

“Anywhere.”

“At the funeral,” Helen says, “I thought about what my mind could not imagine."

Pop floats down through heavenly clouds to a table set for tea. A sonorous voice—that of the pastor from Pop’s funeral—quotes St. Paul: "No eye has seen, no ear has heard, what God has prepared for those who love Him."

Helen Hill was 36 and just achieving prominence in her field when she was killed in her beloved New Orleans. Her alma mater and her loved ones are trying to make sure that her work is not forgotten: The Harvard Film Archive has made new master prints of her films and digitized them onto DVDs that circulate at festivals, classes, and private screenings.

But not all of Helen’s work is finished. The dresses of Florestine Kinchen, which her mother brought to Columbia, hang in the closet of Helen’s childhood bedroom. Paul is committed to finishing her film, The Florestine Collection, about the maker of those dresses; he has the script, animated sequences, and file footage with him in Vancouver. At 20 minutes, this will be Helen’s longest film, and arguably the most personal—a young artist’s quest to find, in the creations of that mysterious seamstress, an essence of the place where Helen Hill chose to make her life.

As the images his wife left behind float across the screen in his editing sessions, Paul knows that he has a career to rebuild and a son to raise. He is determined to ensure that “my son is healthy and happy, and respects Helen’s ideals.”

But these days, Paul himself struggles to believe in those ideals. “There is nothing redeeming about her death,” he says flatly. He admits that his view of the world has changed. He used to think about living in a place to help make it better. Now he is determined to stay away from that place—to think only about himself and his child.

But working on Helen’s film helps. Once she hoped that her work would help bring life to New Orleans; now it helps to bring life back to Paul. He sees it as way to fend off disillusionment, to counter the darkness that has taken up residence in his soul.

“I have to fight not to isolate my son and myself from the world,” Paul says. “That’s not what Helen would want.”

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